Would whites re-institute slavery today if they could?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Would whites re-institute slavery today if they could?

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

Is this guy under the illusion that anyone other than whites abolished slavery in the Western world in the first place?

# ¿ Jun 14, 2014 19:02

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:12

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

Main Paineframe posted:

Slavery still persists today in the agricultural sector. Florida farmworker organizations allege that there's over a thousand literal slaves - minority workers in involuntary servitude, forced to work for masters who buy and sell them as if they were objects - working various fields in Florida today, and have enough escaped slaves and imprisoned slaveowners to prove they're not just making it all up.

Aside from that, though, slavery as practiced two centuries ago is kind of an obsolete system from capital's perspective. The high cost of slaves made them an investment as well as a product, meaning that much money and productivity had to be lost in order to protect the long-term health of the slave. Wage slavery, where there's no upfront cost and thus no long-term stake in the health of the worker, extracts better overall productivity.

Transatlantic slave trade or not, colonialists were perfectly happy to enslave the natives where convenient. If Americans hadn't been importing African slaves, they'd have just enslaved every Native American they could get their hands on instead.

Yeah, slavery in Europe and its early colonies originally revolved around the idea that Christians couldn't be enslaved, but non-Christians were fair game. Same deal with Islam. Thus our word "slave," from the sheer number of then-Pagan Slavs traded through Europe's slave markets. When Europeans first invaded the Americas, slave raiders enslaved the natives with impunity, but due to their lack of resistance to Eurasian diseases and ability to escape back to their home tribes, Europeans decided to buy Africans as slave-labor instead, fueling slave-raiding against rival tribes and kingdoms throughout the continent.Then, after African slaves had been enslaved in the Americas for some time, they started converting to Christianity, meaning that slave-owners needed a new excuse other than religion to keep them enslaved. And so the idea arose that Africans were subhuman and were unique among all races as naturally suitable for slavery, and their descendants could be kept in slavery forever. And we're still living with the legacy of that.

The point is that the really nasty racism against blacks was caused by slavery, the slavery wasn't caused by the racism.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 01:38

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

Main Paineframe posted:

Oh, there actually is literal "chain your employees to their workplace, then throw them into a locked trailer with armed guards at night" slavery occasionally, it's just a lot rarer than the type you're talking about because it's much harder to keep secret outside of rural nowhere and you have to spend a lot more money on chains, locks, and armed guards.

It's not really wrong. Not really 100% right, either, but it's built on a foundation of truths, it's just using them to make some iffy inferences.

It's true that the Emancipation Proclamation was partially justified as a form of economic warfare against the South, and that it only applied to Confederate states, exempting any slaveholding states that remained in the Union as well as some Confederate territory that was already under Union control. To say that this meant that Northern politicians didn't really want to end slavery is absurd, though - the Emancipation Proclamation, being an executive order issued in Lincoln's capacity as commander-in-chief, could only really cover what Lincoln could cook up a half-decent military justification for. He didn't have the authority to end slavery in the Northern states all by himself; that had to be done by legislative action, not just an executive order.

Similarly, while it's true that slavery essentially continued in the South under things like sharecropping, the failure of Reconstruction is somewhat more complex and nuanced than "Northerners didn't really want to end slavery".

Yeah, Confederate apologists love to go on about how Lincoln didn't really free the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, because it only freed the slaves in Confederate territory. But they completely ignore the part where Lincoln had no authority to free slaves except as a war measure against rebels, and that only the passage of a constitutional amendment could legally end it everywhere in the country. Which is, of course, exactly what happened a year after the war ended. But then Confederate apologists have never been real concerned with facts.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 01:50

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

Are people seriously wondering if the present status quo is better than literal chattel slavery? Guess what, back when there was chattel slavery there were still things like exploitation, debt slavery, racism, and discrimination, there were just human beings being openly sold in markets and transported in chains on top of all that.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 02:45 on Jun 15, 2014

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 02:41

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

SedanChair posted:

What if you transported him to Angola, or Arpaio's tent city?

Beatings don't leave as much of a mark I suppose.

Because free blacks were never thrown in prison, beaten, or unjustly oppressed by white authorities in the 19th century.

Don't get me wrong. If someone sat here and argued that the present explosion in the percentage of black males in prison is no better of a situation than how blacks as a whole were under the Jim Crow era, I would say that their argument has merit. But slavery? Give me a goddamn break. I suspect we could go back to Roman times and you'd argue human rights were no worse than they are today.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Jun 15, 2014

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 03:36

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

OneEightHundred posted:

Pretty sure zero people have said that, more like the status quo is really terrible and has persisted a lot of its problems.

Actually SedanChair did literally say that, it's on page 3. The idea that even slight progress in social justice could have been made in the past 200 years goes against the fundamental beliefs of far-leftism, so you'd see people argue that water isn't wet if it lines up with their ideology about the state of the world.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 18:38

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

SedanChair posted:

Again, like most liberals you're obsessed with the narrative of progress. Slavery was obsolete, and social justice had little to do with its obsolescence. Of all the reasons for its gradual replacement by wage slavery, sharecropping and the expansion and industrialization of the prison state, the fact that it was an abhorrent practice did not really amount to anything. If northern capitalists had been able to profit through the plantation system they would have used it. They could not, so they supported the arguments of abolitionists instead. If capitalists now were able to profit through the use of chattel slavery they would use it, and advance talking points to make it legal.

Chattel slavery was expensive. Why invest in the value of a man when you can simply spend him, and lose nothing when he dies? That's our present system. For the most part we don't see its most extreme forms within the borders of the US, but we benefit from outsourcing brutal slavery and exploitation to other nations.

The abolition of slavery is certainly nothing for whites to congratulate themselves about, which is what the OP was angling for.

I will actually agree with you that it was the industrial revolution which brought about the end of chattel slavery in the west, but abolitionism did not just materialize out of the air, it was the product of enlightenment thinking and was highly successful in areas where slavery was not a key part of the economy. That doesn't sound like much, but consider the alternative: Slavery could have continued right along in small numbers in areas where slaves were used primarily for domestic labor, like England, New England, Upper Canada, etc, but it didn't, because of a rise in moral disgust for the institution.. And it was the increasing spread of lack of tolerance for slavery that led to the great Southern freak-out that became the eventual end of legal slavery in the United States.

I will not argue with you that this force was weak. Yes, in areas where slavery was highly, highly profitable, like the Southern US, Caribbean, or Brazil, moral judgements would never have killed off slavery, it was the changes in the economy that did slavery in and allowed morality in to extinguish it once it had become increasingly obsolete. But nonetheless, you can't argue that the morality-based motive to extinguish chattel slavery did not exist, or that it had zero impact.

200 years ago, women like me had no civil rights and no chance at anything other than the shittiest of underpaid employment outside the home. I'm not going to say that there's been zero social progress in the last 200 years, because it's just not true. And I usually do not argue idealistic positions, but your position is so unrealistically far in the other direction there's not much choice.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 19:33

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

SedanChair posted:

OP, would whites re-institute slavery today if they could in as literal a manner as you intend the question, and in as literal a manner as you are capable of processing arguments? Of course not. Markets proved wage slavery to be generally superior to chattel slavery, which is why the South got all butthurt and started a terroristic civil war to begin with.

Is the status quo of racism any better than chattel slavery--or if it is, is credit due to whites for this improved state? No, and this is what your friends seem to understand. I like your friends by the way, and I'm glad they're patient with you.

As I said on Page 3, anyone who thinks the current status quo of racism is no better than actual slavery is a fool, or trying to be edgy.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 19:41

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

SedanChair posted:

I'm not arguing that the life of a slave wasn't terrifying rear end compared to that of almost any American now living. But to view the abolition of slavery as progress is a little simplistic. The abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, rising prosperity etc, these are all illusions brought about by unprecedented prosperity. It could all disappear at any time when our lords find it convenient

I won't disagree, nor do I think progress in anything is inherently one-directional. Not by a long shot. I wouldn't call it "an illusion" though. Potentially the biggest problem right now is increasing wealth disparity. People as a whole, not just in the West, have had an increase in well-being over the past 100 years, and it would take a major gently caress-up to reverse that progress, but multiple things could still conceivably cause it to happen.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jun 15, 2014

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 19:55

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

Rogue0071 posted:

As a far leftist myself, I guess I, and almost all far leftists I know, missed that memo. That's a ridiculous caricature.

And liberals are not "obsessed with the narrative of progress", either.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 20:14

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

SedanChair posted:

You've backed off of everything I've written. What's obviously stupid or hyperbolic?

The "today's culture of racism no better than chattel slavery" thing, which you've now modified to an argument that "progress" is too simplistic an interpretation. This conversion is going in a circle and is pointless.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 20:23

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

Rogue0071 posted:

I haven't claimed they are, and if you want to criticize Sedanchair for making sweeping and inaccurate generalizations do so directly rather than making up more.

Point taken. I'll admit I've been generalizing, I guess I'm influenced by the fact that I used to know a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist who said even more ridiculous things, and know others of a similar bent IRL.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jun 17, 2014

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 20:28

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

gradenko_2000 posted:

IIRC militia groups actually went down during the Clinton years as a result of a backlash from the Oklahoma bombing.

Yeah, and that's because they were going up steadily during the Clinton years, until one of them did something so crazy that suddenly the rest of them wanted to distance themselves from the movement as quickly as possible.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2014 11:51

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:12

Sucrose: Dec 9, 2009

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I don't think it's semantic quibbling to point out that all of this poo poo with Obama is standard politics in the US, just flavored and (fueled to some degree) by racial hatred.

And this was when unemployment was lower, and going steadily down.

This doesn't really prove anything, other than that the dropoff apparently took a couple years to happen, rather than immediately like I thought. But it doesn't show the early years of Clinton's presidency, where the numbers had been rising to get to that point. Obviously, it's even worse under Obama, but there's a very clear Democrat-Republican difference. Also from my understanding "Patriot" groups are largely anti-immigration lunatics; the number of "militia" is actually lower than it was during the Clinton years.

And to be clear I think some of the opposition to Obama is driven by racism on the far right, but it's the cherry on the top of the already fervent resistance he'd get just for being a Democrat president.

Sucrose fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jun 16, 2014

# ¿ Jun 16, 2014 18:31

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Would whites re-institute slavery today if they could?

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